‘discourse of the impossible’

‘… saying that we are concerned with practices and not with ideology, means massively confirming, beneath that seeming honesty of a good methodological principle, the initial division that is rightly challenged in this discourse of the impossible: the division between those whose lot is production and struggle, and those whose lot is discourse and ideology.

The singularity of this discourse, therefore, is no easier for the discourse of history to appropriate than it is for that of philosophy. To the very extent that it provides the possibility of its identification, or lends history its material, it finds itself excluded and rejected into what is not historical. It has to disappear from history, not as repressed, forbidden or unthought, but rather as insignificant: mere verbiage that cannot be counted on any of the registers where speech is deemed to lead to action. Hence the necessarily labryinthine and evanescent form of this account,’ (Rancière 2011: 30)

Rancière, J., 2011. Staging the people : the proletarian and his double, London & New York: Verso Books.